Download Of The Day: Fedora Linux 18 (Spherical Cow) DVD

Fedora Linux version 18 has been released and available for download. Fedora Linux is a community based Linux distribution. Fedora Linux is considered as the third most popular Linux distribution, behind Ubuntu and Mint for desktop usage. The new version comes with several new features such as – an installer that is rewritten and redesigned from the ground up, GNOME v3.6, KDE v4.9, Xfce v4.10, better network security with firewalld, Linux kernel v3.6, Python v3.3, Ruby on Rails v3.0, and much more.

What’s New In Fedora 18

Updated installer : The anaconda installer has been totally redesigned for Fedora 18. Users will now have more flexibility in how they configure their installation. Some tasks will run in the background to speed the installation process.

256 color terminals – Many terminal programs (like vim and ls for example) can take advantage of 256 color terminals, and all xterms I know of support at least 256 colors and sometimes more.

Fedup tool – It is a new tool for upgrading Fedora installations that is replacing preupgrade and the DVD methods of upgrading that have been used in previous Fedora releases. It utilizes systemd for much of the upgrade functionality and will eventually be able to source packages from a DVD and use the standard repository instead of an upgrade specific side repo. In other words, it is possible to install fedup on an Fedora 17 system using yum (yum install fedup). Finally run the fedup-cli command to prepare the upgrade using fedup-cli --network 18 --debuglog fedupdebug.log command.

UEFI Secure Boot – This will allow Fedora to boot on systems that have Secure Boot enabled. Tools are available for administrators to create custom certificates to sign local changes to GRUB or the kernel.

Secure Containers (LXC Container) – Using SELinux and virt-sandbox, services can be run in secure sandboxes, even as root. The virt-sandbox-service package will create mount points and a libvirt container.

Samba 4 – It is a combined set of daemons, client utilities, and Python bindings that allow communicating using SMB1, SMB2, and soon SMB3 protocols. It also implements Active Directory domain controller (DC) functionality as an integrated Kerberos DC, LDAP server, DNS server, and SMB/CIFS server.

/tmp on tmpfs – This is a security and power saving feature. By default, /tmp on Fedora 18 will be on a tmpfs. Storage of large temporary files should be done in /var/tmp. This will reduce the I/O generated on disks, increase SSD lifetime, save power, and improve performance of the /tmp filesystem.

Syscall filters – Syscall filtering is a security mechanism that allows applications to define which syscalls they should be allowed to execute.

Perl v5.16 – Upgrade to Perl 5.16 as brings a lot of changes.

OpenStack – This is an open source cloud computing platform. It lets you set up your own cloud infrastructure, similar to public clouds like Amazon EC2, Azure, etc. Fedora 18 comes with OpenStack “Folsom”.

Eucalyptus – It is a cloud computing software platform for on-premise (private) Infrastructure as a Service clouds. It uses existing infrastructure to create scalable and secure AWS-compatible cloud resources for compute, network and storage.

Web Servers – The Apache httpd package has been upgraded to version 2.4.3-1, which contains numerous security and performance fixes. The lighttpd package has been upgraded to version 1.4.32-2.

Cinnamon – Fedora users now have the option of using Cinnamon, an advanced desktop environment based on GNOME3.

MATE desktop – This destop brings back a classic, intuitive, and easy to use desktop that users have been long requesting.

NetworkManager now supports an enhanced Hotspot – This allows Internet connection sharing mode for Wi-Fi, which enables a much smoother connection sharing experience and is better supported by hardware. This mode is automatically enabled only for new connections to ensure existing configurations are unchanged.

And much more. See Fedora 18 release note for more information.

Fedora 18 Screenshots

Default Desktop

Fedora Gnome Applications

Control Panel

Fedora 18 DVD ISO download

You can download Fedora Linux 18 via the web/ftp server or via BitTorrent (recommended). The following DVD iso images are in live media format:

Download Fedora 18 Xfce version

Posted by: Vivek Gite

The author is the creator of nixCraft and a seasoned sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and a trainer for the Linux operating system/Unix shell scripting. Get the latest tutorials on SysAdmin, Linux/Unix and open source topics via RSS/XML feed or weekly email newsletter.

Your support makes a big difference:

I have a small favor to ask. More people are reading the nixCraft. Many of you block advertising which is your right, and advertising revenues are not sufficient to cover my operating costs. So you can see why I need to ask for your help. The nixCraft takes a lot of my time and hard work to produce. If everyone who reads nixCraft, who likes it, helps fund it, my future would be more secure. You can donate as little as $1 to support nixCraft: